Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521128834 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/04/2010 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.55(d) |
About the Author
Luke Thurston is a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge and has published widely on modernism, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
Read an Excerpt
Cambridge University Press
0521835909 - James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis - by Luke Thurston
Excerpt
Prologue: Groundhog Day
I
'What if there is no tomorrow?' asks jaded weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) in Harold Ramis's 1993 film Groundhog Day. 'There wasn't one today,' adds Phil - at which point, hardly surprisingly, the person on the other end of the telephone line hangs up. If such a 'philosophical' question seems flippant in a Hollywood comedy, in another context - a note written by Nietzsche in 1882 (by coincidence also the year of Joyce's birth) - we are bound to take it more seriously. Under the ominous heading Das grösste Schwergewicht, 'the heaviest burden', Nietzsche demands:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'1
The revelation of eternal recurrence, we should note in passing, is presented by Nietzsche as a hallucination: the news - that there will be no more news, and worse still, that there never has been any - is brought by a demon, a Mephistopheles come to haunt poor Faustus. This Nietzschean apparition will return more than once in our explorations of 'James Overman', as Joyce once signed himself (JJ 162).
The postmodern purgatory of Groundhog Day, however, has none of the ominous grandeur that Nietzsche ascribes to Eternal Return, even if Phil Connors does have to endure long hours of teeth-gnashing existential tedium before he can accede to the 'joyful wisdom' that eventually allows him to form a couple with Andie MacDowell's Rita, as the film relaxes into the reassurance of a stock Hollywood ending. And it goes without saying that the cinematic game devised by Ramis and co-writer Danny Rubin is 'philosophical' only in a strictly irresponsible sense, just as all of Phil's acts on Groundhog Day are only 'acts', his every deed or utterance robbed of psychological depth and authenticity by being a mere citation, an empty iteration. The film thus plays fast and loose - but therein is precisely its philosophical subtlety - with a philosophical problem that, as we have already glimpsed, was of the gravest significance for Nietzsche. Writing in 1888 (shortly before his terminal mental collapse), the philosopher described eternal recurrence as the 'fundamental idea of Zarathustra' and as indeed 'the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained'.2 In Maurice Blanchot's view, the affirmation of eternal recurrence corresponds to a 'limit experience' where thought itself becomes untenable, as the impossible affirmation of affirmation 'itself ' sends Nietzschean thought spinning into fatal self-deconstructive turbulence.3 By contrast, in Groundhog Day's cartoon topology (designed by Escher, one could almost imagine), Phil discovers that precisely nothing can be affirmed; whatever he 'experiences' is immediately struck out, nullified, by the iterative non-temporality in which he is trapped (and this might even, in some allegorical reading of the film, point to an implicit critique of the media industry itself, with its passive customers trapped in pointless cycles of consumption, and so on).
Nevertheless - or perhaps we should write 'therefore' - Groundhog Day's philosophical trickery has a great deal to tell us about Joyce and the eternal literary institution he founded. Indeed, the film's scenario is not entirely light-hearted; in exploiting the comic possibilities of repetition, it has simultaneously to touch on questions of individual destitution, suicide and mental breakdown. (One scene has Phil virtually paraphrase Ecce Homo when he declares in a roadside café, 'I am a god.') But above all, for the Joycean critic, Groundhog Day offers a comic version of an eternal institutional embarrassment that is routinely addressed in every preface to a new book on Joyce: namely, the problem of its being, in Yogi Berra's immortal words, 'déjà vu all over again'. How, it is asked, can Joycean criticism ever overcome or escape from its essentially tautologous predicament, its eternal repetition of what Joyce wrote as the 'sehm asnuh' (FW 620.17)? Like Phil Connors, each Joycean begins in a stifling confrontation with the same-as-new, aware that in his search for semic novelty he 'moves in vicous cicles' (FW 134.16), in cycles of historical repetition inscribed by Joyce with Vico's authority (and note that such cycles are literally made 'vicious' only by adding an 'I', in a subtle textual manoeuvre that we shall link to Lacan's reading of Joyce).
But there are other reasons, beyond the anxiety-ridden comedy of Phil's ever-recycling day, for us to think of Groundhog Day as emblematically Joycean. Joyce's superstitious attitude to dates was first noted by Ellmann in the opening words of his biography:
James Joyce liked to think about his birthday. In later years, fond of coincidences, he was pleased to discover that he shared his birth year, 1882, with Eamon De Valera, Wyndham Lewis and Frank Budgen, and his birthday and year with James Stephens. That February 2 was Candlemas helped to confirm its importance; that it was Groundhog Day added a comic touch; and Joyce made it even more his own by contriving, with great difficulty, to see the first copies of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on that white day. (JJ 23)
The curious coincidence, as Bloom might have put it, of the church feast of Candlemas and Groundhog Day, itself turns out to be rooted in a veritably 'Joycean' act of cultural and linguistic hybridisation. The eighteenth-century German and English settlers of Pennsylvania chose to celebrate Candlemas in a new way by linking it to a Native American tradition: that of venerating the ancestral Wojak, neatly troped into English as 'woodchuck', also known as the groundhog - so that every year on 2 February this squirrel-like rodent, the embodiment of ancestral wisdom, would by its activity foretell the coming of spring, which was likewise prefigured by the symbolic lighting of candles in church.
Joyce's sense of the fatal significance of dates was not, however, as Ellmann seems to imply with the curious phrase 'on that white day', a wholly pleasurable matter, the bringing of light and renewal. Indeed, an earlier biographer of Joyce, Herbert Gorman, had written of the author's birth - in a passage that was almost certainly, scholars have argued, 'ghosted' by Joyce himself - in the very blackest of tones:
The times were heavy with thunder and startled by unexpected flashes of cruel lightning . . . 1882 was an année terrible in the annals of Irish history. On May fifth (when James Joyce was three months and three days old) there was the famous torchlight procession through the streets of the city, a procession celebrating the liberation of Parnell and Michael Davitt from Kilmainham Jail and loud with optimism for the future . . . And in the twilight of this day . . . Joe Brady and his Invincibles left the public house near the gates of the Lower Castle Yard, drove to the Phoenix Park and there slaughtered the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the permanent Under-Secretary Thomas Henry Burke . . . James Joyce, sleeping quietly in his crib, was mercifully unconscious of the fact that he had been born in a black period.4
Far from being born on a white day, Joyce thus entered the world, according to Gorman's text, in a black period. The ghostly imprimatur (Wakean postmark or 'ghostmark', FW 473.9) of Joyce's co-authorship here is legible in the ominous rumble of thunder that accompanies the birth; as an avid reader of the Scienza Nuova, Joyce knew that Viconian cosmology marked the beginning of a ricorso, a new historical cycle, with a thunderclap. If the repetitive patterns of Irish history were indeed vicious circles, as the young Joyce had felt so bitterly, in the retrospective imagination of the older man that viciousness already loomed like a baleful storm cloud over the 'année terrible' of his birth (and perhaps, it is hinted, gave Joyce his lifelong fear of thunder). Hence the sole glimmer of light allowed into Gorman's tableau, provided by the torchlit nationalist procession, is revealed with dark irony to be pure Luciferan duplicity, its loud optimism exposed as a sham by the subsequent 'fiendish' murders that will in turn be 'slid lucifericiously within' the Wake (FW 182.5). The revelation or revaluation of light-rays and the enlightenment they symbolise as Luciferan double-dealing, figured unthinkably in the diabolic coincidence of 'darkness visible', will return throughout our study as it explores the sinful and brilliant act of writing in Joyce.
But, crucially, we shall also find that what is revealed in and by Joycean writing is irreducible to any particular historical meaning or narrative content; indeed, the literary act for Joyce will be shown to mark precisely the breaking out of meaning. If this cultural rupture is often considered the sign of a quintessentially modernist aesthetic, we shall show that it is best understood as corresponding to a properly theological concept of revelation: the idea that, as Giorgio Agamben writes, 'all human speech and knowledge has at its root and foundation an openness that infinitely transcends it'.5
II
1882, then, the year when Joyce shared his birthday on Groundhog Day with De Valera (whose name will be disfigured in the Wake as the mark of an Irish 'devil era' (FW 473.7-8), also saw the publication of Nietzsche's Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, where eternal recurrence was proclaimed anew to the world. With this philosophical event, writes Pierre Klossowski, something changed, albeit paradoxically, in the human relation to history:
Beginning with the experience of the Eternal Return, which announced a break with this irreversible once and for all, Nietzsche also developed a new version of fatality - that of the Vicious Circle, which suppresses every goal and meaning since the beginning and the end always merge with each other.6
A vicious circle indeed: as Klossowski's reading makes clear, an intellectual 'history' of Nietzschean thought risks succumbing here to the most obvious booby trap, as the conceptual transformation in question marks each of the terms ordinarily used as historical co-ordinates - 'beginning', 'experience', 'break', 'new version', etc. - as Wakean 'quashed quotatoes' (FW 183.22), their semantic valence and coherence, if not suppressed, at least indefinitely suspended, put in doubt. The proper consequence of Nietzsche's 'breakthrough' - Klossowski goes so far as to dub it 'the law of the Vicious Circle' - is the 'metamorphosis of the individual' (71): not, that is, the mere transformation of particular human beings but a break with the very concept of self-identity, the Principium Individuationis that Nietzsche had borrowed from Schopenhauer to designate modernity's mechanistic appropriation of and alienation from the primal chaos of nature.7
The year of Joyce's birth, then, saw a great Nietzschean revelation; and if that date did not turn out to signal the end of all human history, it was certainly to acquire great significance in Joyce's own self-made history. Yet Joyce's superstitions about dates and historical coincidences are not, I hope to show, merely symptoms of an eccentricity to be smiled over indulgently by biographers. Rather, they are imaginary side-effects of the central - and indeed eminently Nietzschean - ambition of Joycean art: namely, to re-invent the historical status of the 'I', to grasp and body forth in writing an instance of human poesis, the power to name and make a world through artistic 'factification' (FW 496.34), in a way forever ruled out or misrepresented, rendered uncanny or laughable, by official realist histories.
Our reference to Groundhog Day and to the comic embarrassment of beginning again thus loses its accidental or coincidental status - or rather, that status becomes as such truly Joycean. Joyce's writing presents (that is, re-presents) in its 'teems of times and happy returns' (FW 215.22-3) - from the constrictive repetitions of Dubliners to the cosmic 'vicociclometer' (FW 614.27) of Finnegans Wake - the fundamental ambiguity of a time lived 'outside' history. On the one hand, such a condition may be experienced or diagnosed as a temporal paralysis, the failure to remember or symbolise properly. Psychoanalysis, as we shall see, first sets out to cure that symptomatic paralysis by interpreting it, by providing it with a semantic solution. (Note the etymological resonance here: paralysis, analysis and solution are all rooted in the Greek luein, 'to loosen', a root more visible in the German Lösung.) On the other hand the instant of 'madness' imagined outside linear history will be identified by Joyce - and here he looks back to a Romantic tradition exemplified above all by the madness of Blake - with an escape into the literary 'thing itself', the radical affirmation of poesis: what Nietzsche calls 'a sacred yes-saying'.8
The 'unspeakable' Joyce of Part II is located between these two aspects or interpretations of a revelation that can be either paralysing or liberating. Notwithstanding the many differences between its effects in philosophy and in literature, when that momentous unveiling is inscribed by Nietzsche in the year of Joyce's birth we are given a seductive formula for this singular coincidence of philosophy and the aesthetic - at precisely the point of the modernist 'metamorphosis of the individual', to recall Klossowski's phrase. The ultimately affirmative impetus of such a metamorphosis in Joyce is, as we shall see, inseparable from his unflinching awareness of the fatal and inevitable incompatibility - or better, war - between it and the ego, that endless self-identifying declamation. For Blanchot, in a comparable sense, the impossibility of bearing the force of Nietzschean affirmation is encapsulated by the self-undoing (self-dissolving or self-analytic, auto-luein) instance of the personal pronoun:
He who kills himself is the great affirmer of the present. I want to kill myself in an 'absolute' instant, the only one which will not pass and will not be surpassed. Death, if it arrived at the time we choose, would be an apotheosis of the instant; the instant in it would be that very flash of brilliance which the mystics speak of, and surely because of this, suicide retains the power of an exceptional affirmation.9
An apotheosis of the instant: in Blanchot's vivid reprise of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, the absolute time before history transcends the individual; the Jetztpunkt or immediate immersion in existence can never be re-presented before an appropriative 'I', made 'mine' or 'arrive at the time we choose'. Perhaps the suicidal ego falls into the trap of imagining some other temporality, where 'now' could somehow coalesce with pure self-affirmation, where I could occupy or identify with it in an act of self-apotheosis. But this 'fantasy of total affirmation', as Simon Critchley describes it,10 is inherently self-defeating, self-unbinding: for what it struggles to represent in its transgressive act is precisely a moment at which the meaning-laden ego becomes irrelevant, finds itself consigned to aesthetic passivity, to being-acted-upon. We shall see how, in Joyce's moments of vocation (which Lacan links to the revelation inscribed as 'epiphany'), the fantasmatic affirmation is ascribed to the Other. When we consider what Derrida puns as ouï-dire - at once hearing the call of a voice and voicing the unrepresentable force of an affirmation11 - we shall argue that for Joyce this problem entails entering into the Other's fantasy, taking up a position inside another's dream. And the crucial Joycean problem, as we shall see at the very end of our argument, is how to awaken from that dream.
But we should begin by asking how these questions of self-affirmation and self-dissolution bear on the problem of institutional embarrassment we touched on above - in other words, the overwhelming sense of redundancy in Joycean criticism? It is important here not to be distracted by what may be seen as the contemporary academic over-investment in Joyce. The real problem of Joyce for literary criticism now cannot be reduced to the impression of exhaustive or surplus interpretation derived, say, from a glance at the allegedly excessive levels of publishing associated with the writer's name. On the contrary, the challenge Joyce deliberately poses to the literary and academic institution bears precisely on the integrity of the 'now' in literary interpretation: a problem that, as we shall see, is bound up with the eccentric temporality of the human subject itself, as a self-theorising 'I' both caught up in and irreducible to language and history. And we shall argue that the 'sense of redundancy' in Joyce criticism is wholly bound up with this problem of 'now' (note how in 'seme asnuh' [FW 620.17] that word collapses into 'new') and that it lies at the very heart of the literary thing, the singular attraction and resistance that binds his work to criticism and to the wider institutions of culture.
But by the same token, of course, that 'thing' cannot be considered an exclusive property of Joyce, even if the author were held to be some supreme end or realisation of literature (a kind of 'James Overman'). In the first place, the 'same' problem - of unaccountable literary excess - obviously afflicts or enriches our critical response to the work of Joyce's favourite artistic precursor, Shakespeare. Frank Kermode writes of how 'redundancy is in the very nature of Hamlet':12 Shakespeare's work already poses in itself the question of textual surplus that returns today, as it were symptomatically, in the embarrassment of institutional over-production. We shall see how Joyce treated this coincidence of literary and critical excess as a way to address questions, not simply of his 'own' work as institution and legacy, but of institution, testament, will, as they determine and disturb all interpretation.
III
'Anima enim facit novas compositiones, licet non faciat novas res.'13
St Bonaventure's edict forbidding creation ex nihilo to the mortal soul might serve as a legend to be carved above the gateway of the Joycean institution. There can only be new arrangements of the existing material; no new thing can be introduced from the outside: such a vision of institutional closure certainly corresponds to a popular image of Joycean scholarship, trapped in its endless, self-perpetuating cycles. How can the invocation of psychoanalysis - even if Freud thought that, in the ideal case, analysis replaced passive repetition with willed memory - possibly allow us to break the boundaries of this self-enclosed institution? To answer this, we should begin by attending carefully to Bonaventure's words. In defining the anima (a term that, as we shall see, has manifold significance in the encounter between Joyce and psychoanalysis), the great Franciscan makes two statements whose apparent complementarity masks a crucial difference: while the soul in itself 'makes new compositions' - as one of its inherent properties - conversely licet non, it is not allowed to 'make a new thing'. In other words, the description of the soul is keyed to a specific prohibition, as if its very status as anima depended on the obedience of a certain law. Joyce's work begins in a confrontation with a ban on creation, and arguably it continues to grapple with that ban in the evolving Joycean institution of today. Psychoanalysis, which itself grew out of an interrogation of prohibitions and censorship, is the site of a singular poesis - the transgressive 'factification' (FW 496.34) of precisely a 'new thing': a new problematic of sexual identity in terms of its Unbehagen in der Kultur, its intractable conflict with social existence.14 The 'Freudian Thing', as Lacan dubbed it in 1955, entails the emergence - the revelation - of something radically new: a singular point of resistance to the semantic forms imposed by an authoritarian social discourse of identity (E:S 107-11). And indeed Freudian theory itself partly constitutes an effort to restore such a discourse, with its repeated attempts to convert the 'Copernican' act of its discovery back into a suitably 'Ptolemaic' discourse15 - above all, that is, a discourse that would replace the integral meaning that had been lost.
The following study will not therefore attempt to apply psychoanalytic ideas to Joyce's work, nor will it explore what Jean Kimball calls the 'textual dialogue' between psychoanalytic theory and Joycean creation.16 A brief discussion of my reasons for avoiding these two traditional ways of coupling Joyce and psychoanalysis may shed some light on the aims and presuppositions of my reading.
It is well known that Lacan gave a seminar 'on Joyce' at the very end of his career in 1975-6, under the title Le sinthome.17 The first thing one discovers, should one rashly attempt actually to read that seminar, however, is that a phrase such as 'Lacan's seminar on Joyce' - with its implicit notion of theory being exported from the clinical domain to a literary 'case' - is altogether misleading. Indeed, at the conclusion of his address to the Fifth International Joyce Symposium at the Sorbonne in 1975, Lacan himself made this clear when he declared with 'jocoserious' (U 17.309) hyperbole that 'L'orbe est sur Joyce'.18 If the entire world were 'on' Joyce, it would be impossible to envisage that gargantuan figure as a single theoretical 'topic' to be treated in a seminar. As we shall see, in Le sinthome Lacan's aim was a more modest one: to try, in Jacques-Alain Miller's phrase, 'to take a leaf out of Joyce's book'19 - in other words, to get involved in a writing practice that exceeded his theoretical discourse, touched on a problem irreducible to the psychoanalytic representation of the subject. When Lacan tries to take a leaf out of Joyce's book, we shall see that what he struggles with is an unworldly geometry, a topological 'writing' that testifies to nothing less than a défaut dans l'univers, a faulty or lacking universe.20
But as early as 1958, Lacan had brusquely dismissed the old tradition of 'applied psychoanalysis': 'Psychoanalysis', he wrote in his article Jeunesse de Gide, 'can only be applied, in the proper sense of the term, as treatment and thus to a subject who speaks and listens.'21 It was not that Lacan had many doubts about the general interpretative possibilities that Freud's discovery entailed; rather, he was concerned that those possibilities should not be obliterated by a lazy disregard for the real structural differences between various kinds of linguistic event. In the popular 'Freudian' tendency to move freely between the talking cure and the literary text, taking both to be products of a single uniform 'unconscious', he saw nothing but muddled thinking.22 Moreover, by the final decade of his work in the 1970s, the distinction between the speech of the analysand and the écrit - the latter term designating a singular problematic of writing exemplified above all by Joyce - had become in Lacan's eyes perhaps the central problem for psychoanalytic thought. In fact, as we shall see, one of the major instigations of Lacan's interest in Joyce was what he regarded as a deliberate artistic refusal of psychoanalysis. Thus, rather than seeking to find confirmation in Joyce's writing of the ideas pursued in his teaching, Lacan approached it in search of something beyond Freudian truth.
Now, what is often proposed as a more rigorous alternative to the 'applied psychoanalysis' model is the exploration of the so-called dialogue between Joyce's work and psychoanalytic theory: an attempt to trace in the author's research and intellectual development his engagement with theoretical motifs that then informed - or rather were deformed by - his writing. There is no denying that the examination of Joyce's art as a complex response to certain specific readings can be extremely useful, as was shown by Ellmann's The Consciousness of Joyce and by many critical studies since - a recent example being the work of Jean Kimball.23
Kimball's work provides a good illustration both of how fruitful this 'intertextual' approach to the link between Joyce and psychoanalysis can be and also, we shall argue, of its central weakness. Kimball begins by upbraiding earlier critics such as Mark Shechner and Sheldon Brivic for attempting to outline a notional 'psychoanalytic picture of Joyce's mind', offering instead her own perspective as resolutely 'textual'.24 She thus avoids any attribution of psychological 'depth' to the author, unhappy with the very notion of dealing with 'Joyce's mind', let alone with its 'development' (a term she quotes from Brivic). But the trouble with this rigorous adherence to a non-psychological intertextuality - Kimball writes that her interest is 'in the way . . . texts talk to one another' - is that it completely fails to situate this 'dialogue' with psychoanalysis within Joyce's broader engagement with questions of subjectivity, his complex interpretation and subversion of traditional literary and philosophical ways of articulating the self.
In terms of our interest in the encounter between Joyce and Lacan, what is particularly striking here is how the alternative posed by Kimball - applied psychoanalysis or intertextuality - entirely misses out what Lacan isolates as the central problem in Joyce: that of the 'I', understood not simply as a character in the Freudian psyche but as an enigmatic problem of 'epiphany' or apparition. As we shall see, it is no accident that the latter term is usually associated not with the unconscious but with another Freudian motif, the uncanny: while the unconscious is governed by the endless repetition and deformation of discursive elements (as seen in 'the way texts talk to one another' enjoyed by Kimball), the uncanny or apparitional is precisely untimely, not subject to the temporal syntax of psychoanalytic - or indeed of any other - interpretation. The idea of the uncanny having at its kernel something radically untranslatable is of course massively resisted by Freudian theory, in which Unheimlichkeit is nothing but a privileged example of the return of the repressed, and as such an illustration of the normal-neurotic mechanism of the unconscious. But, as Slavoj Žižek's work has made clear, the anxiety triggered by the fantasmatic double has its roots in a problem of identity that is irreducible to the semiotic logic of the unconscious. The uncanny, writes Žižek, is rather a 'confirmation of how the Real persists in the very heart of the Imaginary': the formation not only of interpretable symptoms, but of the 'I' itself, is knotted together with the traumatic emergence of jouissance.25
Now, if we consider the 'I' a site of uncanny apparition, this would imply our taking seriously the old Shakespearean pun in which the personal pronoun doubles 'eye'. Joel Fineman has shown how this venerable literary pun in English indeed resonates with specific aspects of Lacan's teaching, and we shall see how Joyce rewrites this 'as Great Shapesphere puns it' (FW 295.4) alongside many other Shakespearean characters and also Freudian ones.26 Indeed, one reason Joyce's reading of the 'freudful' (FW 411.35) culture of psychoanalysis is so antagonistic, we shall argue, is that he finds the interrogation of the 'I' supposedly launched there to be manifestly preceded - indeed, exceeded - in a range of literary texts, chiefly those by Shakespeare. But of course we should add that Freud himself willingly acknowledged on a number of occasions that his so-called discoveries were indeed nothing but scientific reformulations of things seen long before by artists.
© Cambridge University Press